Lindsay Lohan, 24, gets her name and face all over the news because she went to jail for 14 days.
Justin Allen, 23, Brett Linley, 29, Matthew Weikert, 29, Justus Bartett, 27, Dave Santos, 21, Chase Stanley, 21, Jesse Reed, 26, Matthew Johnson, 21, Zachary Fisher, 24, Brandon King, 23, Christopher Goeke, 23, and Sheldon Tate, 27, are all Marines....that gave their lives for your freedom this week.
A blog comment response to that -
# Shannon Love Says:
October 3rd, 2010 at 2:42 pm
You should remind your son that as a culture, we pay attention to people like Lohan precisely because they are ultimately unimportant. Celebrities of all kinds serve merely to create a common subject we all talk about. Since they do nothing important and contribute little, people don’t get truly emotionally invested in them. We can socialize with others by talking about celebrities or sports without people losing emotional control. Celebrities sole cultural function is to be gossip worthy.
Celebrities are ultimately disposable. When they self-destruct, we laugh about it and start talking about the next new celebrity. They don’t mean anything.
The Marines, by contrast ,do important, vital things that people care deeply about. When we hold them up as exemplars, we make significant statements about profoundly important things. People get very emotional one way or the other. Therefore, we wrap our broad public approval of soldiers, firefighters and similar important people in stiff ritual.
It is one of the great ironies of the information age that there is an inverse relationship between the importance of people and task and the amount of public attention we pay to them.
Ask anyone what is the most important task in a large modern city. Few people will say water and sewage and yet those systems are absolutely vital to keeping people alive in cities. People can survive longer in a city without electricity than they can without water or sewage. Yet, how much attention do people pay to those services? How much status do we give the people who work to provide those services.
In some strange sense, in the modern world, being ignored is the truest indicator of true significance. It is as if somethings are so important we can’t talk about them casually. We can’t take them granted. We take them in vain.
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